Internet Activity 3

Google maps mashups

There are many google maps mashups out there, some of the more interesting ones are:

http://www.flightstats.com/go/FlightTracker/trackFlight.do

It lets you track your flight (well, all flights) to see when they will arrive at the airport.

There is also Flicks (http://photoskml.googlepages.com/flicks.htm) which lets you see where pictures were taken on flicker (the person needs to embed a geocode to tell it where, but thats all). It is nice because then you can see the sights from one location (if people aren't lying about where the pictures were taken). It could even help you to decide where to vacation to!

A third one is:

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/sealevel

It tells you where places are vulnerable to rising sea levels. This would be important for coastal cities because it could help people decided whether or not to move out of their homes.

Generators and the likes.

Here are some things that I have generated using different generators:
This one was created using http://hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php. It is a simple generator, but I liked it because I could make it do the 1984 thing, Einstein has clearly been gotten by the Ministry of Truth.

This next one was created using the clippy generator (http://www.imagegenerator.net/create/clippy/). Everyone loves Clippy!

Well, at least Clippy thinks so...

You know you want to make your own O'reilly books... (http://www.oreillymaker.com/)




Thoughts on Online generators:

I definately thought that the generators that I picked were fun to use, I enjoyed the Einstein one the most because it was simple to use, and easy for me to make him write something funny.

For the most part Online generators are just for wasting time, but there are some that are useful, like password generators, name generators and Lorem Ipsum generators. The ones that actually generate text are generally more useful than those that generate images, there are however exceptions, like the 3D box generator which lets you make a box that represents your software or something that you are selling.

RSS Feeds

Personally, I have been using RSS feeds for quite some time.

I prefer to view a site through Google Reader (or another rss reader) because it allows me to save the time in looking to see if there is another post (or new content on the site). Most of the time, I simply go to Google Reader instead of actually going to other websites because I have a large number of sites that it keeps track of for me. One of the sites that I keep track of with it is a 'digg style' site (30-50 posts per day), where users submit content to it. This would be very time consuming to have to go to that page multiple times every day to see if there was something that was interesting to me. With Google Reader, all I have to do is click on the feed and see if there is anything interesting in the titles of the posts, and if there is, I end up going to look at it, otherwise I just ignore it.

There are three ways to add an RSS feed to Google Reader. The first way is to go to the page and look to see if there is an rss icon in the address bar. If there is, you just click on it and a page will load asking you what you want to do with the rss feed. Here you can make it a live bookmark in your browser (at least in Firefox) or you can add it to your Google homepage, or you can add it to Google Reader, or you can just copy the link into another RSS reader.

The second way of adding something your reader is to search for it from within Google Reader. All you have to do is click on the "Add Subscription" and it asks you for the URL of the feed, or you can use it to search for something to add.

A third way is to use the browse recommendations functionality in Google Reader. This only really works if you have at least one or two feeds that you are already subscribed to. It lists various feeds that Google recommends to you based on the feeds that you are already keeping track of.